2
Adam was discharged in 1885 and started to beat his way home. In appearance he had changed little. There was no military carriage about him. The cavalry didn’t act that way. Indeed some units took pride in a sloppy posture.
Adam felt that he was sleepwalking. It is a hard thing to leave any deeply routined life, even if you hate it. In the morning he awakened on a split second and lay waiting for reveille. His calves missed the hug of leggings and his throat felt naked without its tight collar. He arrived in Chicago, and there, for no reason, rented a furnished room for a week, stayed in it for two days, went to Buffalo,” changed his mind, and moved to Niagara Falls. He didn’t want to go home and he put it off as long as possible. Home was not a pleasant place in his mind. The kind of feelings he had had there were dead in him, and he had a reluctance to bring them to life. He watched the falls by the hour. Their roar stupefied and hypnotized him.
One evening he felt a crippling loneliness for the close men in barracks and tent. His impulse was to rush into a crowd for warmth, any crowd. The first crowded public place he could find was a little bar, thronged and smoky. He sighed with pleasure, almost nestled in the human clot the way a cat nestles into a woodpile. He ordered whisky and drank it and felt warm and good. He did not see or hear. He simply absorbed the contact.
As it grew late and the men began to drift away, he became fearful of the time when he would have to go home. Soon he was alone with the bartender, who was rubbing and rubbing the mahogany of the bar and trying with his eyes and his manner to get Adam to go.
“I’ll have one more,” Adam said.
The bartender set the bottle out. Adam noticed him for the first time. He had a strawberry mark on his forehead.
“I’m a stranger in these parts,” said Adam.
“That’s what we mostly get at the falls,” the bartender said.
“I’ve been in the army. Cavalry.”
“Yeah!” the bartender said.
Adam felt suddenly that he had to impress this man, had to get under his skin some way. “Fighting Indians,” he said. “Had some great times.”
The man did not answer him.
“My brother has a mark on his head.”
The bartender touched the strawberry mark with his fingers. “Birthmark,” he said. “Gets bigger every year. Your brother got one?”
“His came from a cut. He wrote me about it.”
“You notice this one of mine looks like a cat?”
“Sure it does.”
“That’s my nickname, Cat. Had it all my life. They say my old lady must of been scared by a cat when she was having me.”
“I’m on my way home. Been away a long time. Won’t you have a drink?”
“Thanks. Where you staying?”
“Mrs. May’s boarding house.”
“I know her. What they tell is she fills you up with soup so you can’t eat much meat.”
“I guess there are tricks to every trade,” said Adam.
“I guess that’s right. There’s sure plenty in mine.”
“I bet that’s true,” said Adam.
“But the one trick I need I haven’t got. I wisht I knew that one.”
“What is it?”
“How the hell to get you to go home and let me close up.”
Adam stared at him, stared at him and did not speak.
“It’s a joke,” the bartender said uneasily.
“I guess I’ll go home in the morning,” said Adam. “I mean my real home.”
“Good luck,” the bartender said.
Adam walked through the dark town, increasing his speed as though his loneliness sniffed along behind him. The sagging front steps of his boarding house creaked a warning as he climbed them. The hall was gloomed with the dot of yellow light from an oil lamp turned down so low that it jerked expiringly.
The landlady stood in her open doorway and her nose made a shadow to the bottom of her chin. Her cold eyes followed Adam as do the eyes of a front-painted portrait, and she listened with her nose for the whisky that was in him.
“Good night,” said Adam.
She did not answer him.
At the top of the first flight he looked back. Her head was raised, and now her chin made a shadow on her throat and her eyes had no pupils.
His room smelled of dust dampened and dried many times. He picked a match from his block and scratched it on the side of the block. He lighted the shank of candle in the japanned candlestick and regarded the bed—as spineless as a hammock and covered with a dirty patchwork quilt, the cotton batting spilling from the edges.
The porch steps complained again, and Adam knew the woman would be standing in her doorway ready to spray inhospitality on the new arrival.
Adam sat down in a straight chair and put his elbows on his knees and supported his chin in his hands. A roomer down the hall began a patient, continuing cough against the quiet night.
And Adam knew he could not go home. He had heard old soldiers tell of doing what he was going to do.
“I just couldn’t stand it. Didn’t have no place to go. Didn’t know nobody. Wandered around and pretty soon I got in a panic like a kid, and first thing I knowed I’m begging the sergeant to let me back in—like he was doing me a favor.”
Back in Chicago, Adam re-enlisted and asked to be assigned to his old regiment. On the train going west the men of his squadron seemed very dear and desirable.
While he waited to change trains in Kansas City, he heard his name called and a message was shoved into his hand—orders to report to Washington to the office of the Secretary of War. Adam in his five years had absorbed rather than learned never to wonder about an order. To an enlisted man the high far gods in Washington were crazy, and if a soldier wanted to keep his sanity he thought about generals as little as possible.
In due course Adam gave his name to a clerk and went to sit in an anteroom. His father found him there. It took Adam a moment to recognize Cyrus, and much longer to get used to him. Cyrus had become a great man. He dressed like a great man—black broadcloth coat and trousers, wide black hat, overcoat with a velvet collar, ebony cane which he made to seem a sword. And Cyrus conducted himself like a great man. His speech was slow and mellow, measured and unexcited, his gestures were wide, and new teeth gave him a vulpine smile out of all proportion to his emotion.
After Adam had realized that this was his father he was still puzzled. Suddenly he looked down—no wooden leg. The leg was straight, bent at the knee, and the foot was clad in a polished kid congress gaiter. When he moved there was a limp, but not a clumping wooden-legged limp.
Cyrus saw the look. “Mechanical,” he said, “Works on a hinge. Got a spring. Don’t even limp when I set my mind to it. I’ll show it to you when I take it off. Come along with me.”
Adam said, “I’m under orders, sir. I’m to report to Colonel Wells.”
“I know you are. I told Wells to issue the orders. Come along.”
Adam said uneasily, “If you don’t mind, sir, I think I’d better report to Colonel Wells.”
His father reversed himself. “I was testing you,” he said grandly. “I wanted to see whether the army has any discipline these days. Good boy. I knew it would be good for you. You’re a man and a soldier, my boy.”
“I’m under orders, sir,” said Adam. This man was a stranger to him. A faint distaste arose in Adam. Something was not true. And the speed with which doors opened straight to the Colonel, the obsequious respect of that officer, the words, “The Secretary will see you now, sir,” did not remove Adam’s feeling.
“This is my son, a private soldier, Mr. Secretary—just as I was—a private soldier in the United States Army.”
“I was discharged a corporal, sir,” said Adam. He hardly heard the exchange of compliments. He was thinking, This is the Secretary of War. Can’t he see that this isn’t the way my father is? He’s play-acting. What’s happened to him? It’s funny the Secretary can’t see it.
They walked to the small hotel where Cyrus lived, and on the way Cyrus pointed out the sights, the buildings, the spots of history, with the expansiveness of a lecturer. “I live in a hotel,” he said. “I’ve thought of getting a house, but I’m on the move so much it wouldn’t hardly pay. I’m all over the country most of the time.”